Good Grief and the Good Earth

What is this thing they call dirt in Central Florida?  It looks like sand mixed with a little topsoil to me.  You should have seen my face when I first dug up a clump of "grass" only to find salt and pepper underneath trying to pass as dirt.  I was perplexed.

I am spoiled when it comes to soil.  I grew up in the 1950's and 1960's in the Midwestern corn belt.  The dirt was dark and rich and vital. If you stuck a seed in the ground it would never fail to grow. My sweet Mother had a vegetable garden as well as flowers.  Getting things to grow was never a problem for her.  When I was a little girl, I liked to follow her around to see what she was going to do next. She was everything to me back then.  I knew if I stuck close to her, interesting things would happen.

Outside in late spring or early summer, she would sometimes keep me out of her hair by giving me a packet of zinnia seeds to plant. They would most definitely sprout and grow into beautiful flowers.  They were my flowers.  I helped them grow from tiny seeds.  It was magical.  That is probably when I first caught the gardening bug.  Thank you, Ma!

When T and I first moved to upstate New York, we would often go for long drives in the country to compensate for living our lives as worker bees in town.  We could not help but notice the soil when the NYS farmers would till their fields. Those Upstate New York fields were filled with large rocks.  How in the world they manage to plant crops I will never know.  Apparently it is a constant struggle because with freezing and thawing the ground keeps pushing up rocks from the deepest depths of the earth.  If you notice a preponderance of lovely stone walls and fences in NYS it is because each year the farmers have to pull big stones and slabs of rock out of the fields so they can plant seeds. They have to do something with those piles of rocks. Consequently, stone fences are what they used to mark their property lines and field borders.  It must have been especially hard and discouraging work for the early settlers with their simple tools.  Thankfully they stuck with it and figured out how to work that stubborn land. They created beautiful stone fences with the rocks and stones.  The results are unique and amazing, well worth the effort. 

Once we moved out of town and into the country we got serious about perennial gardening.  In addition to removing rocks, we enriched the heavy clay soil on our land.  T was still young back then.  He did some impressive "double digging" for numerous perennial beds. We read gardening books.  We badgered other gardeners with questions. We made mistakes. We figured it out. We changed. We learned.

The first year on that land my Mom came to visit and brought us small, old-fashioned yellow bearded irises she dug out of her own garden.  She also brought us a start from her infamous trumpet vine.  The original plant had been in her father's garden.  She took a cutting from his trumpet vine before he died in 1961 and she kept it alive all those years.  Those were the plants we started with.  

For years we mulched with composted horse manure in order to improve that soil.  Is there anything more comforting than having a mountain of composted horse manure delivered to and dumped on your property?  As I said, we lived in the country.  It was fully composted, so it did not smell. No one ever complained about our manure pile. I figured they wished they had one, too.  Who wouldn't? 

We spent every weekend for 6 weeks each spring shoveling shit into our wheelbarrow and then hauling it all over our land to mulch the flower beds.  Eventually the mountain became a mole hill.  When it was gone, I would plant pumpkin seeds in the good dirt that remained and it became the source for our Halloween pumpkins. 

I am assuming our current HOA will not allow us to have a mountain of composted horse manure delivered to our front yard in this subdivision in Central Florida.  Bummer.  Where would we put it?  In the garage?  Oh, that IS an evil thought.  Please do not let me do that.  Instead, we must buy our composted cow manure in bags, for crying out loud. Like normal people. How did it come to this?

So here we are starting over, not knowing the land nor understanding the soil. Again.

I get up each morning and stroll out through the lanai, peering out of our screened-in "birdcage" to stare at the new plantings in the back yard, imagining they have grown overnight.  I need to get my fat ass out the screen door and commune with those plants!  I need to walk the land, and stop thinking of it as just a small yard.  The Good Earth deserves more respect.  I need to surrender to this sandy soil and figure out what likes to grow in it. 

A friend once gave me a button that said "I don't know where I am going, but I'm on my way!"   It made me smile because it was so true.  I like to think this is me at my best, aching and floundering; slouching towards change much like Yeats' rough beast from Bethlehem. 

Up North I had daylilies of every type and color I could find. The wild ones started blooming in late June.  I thought wild daylilies were the most beautiful wildflower of all; however, now that I have seen Maypops in the wild at Lake Louisa State Park in Clermont, Florida, wild daylilies may have to try harder to get my vote.  Maypops are also called passionflower vine.  The Latin name for Maypops is "Passiflora incarnata!"  I think you get the picture.

Once the wild daylilies were spent Up North, one hybrid variety after another would bloom through the end of August.  I loved my daylilies.  For 9 long months of every cold, gray year I waited for them.  When they poked their way out of the earth and started growing, I was happy.  I miss them like an old friend.  I heard rumors there are varieties that grow in zone 9.  I am not sure if I believe it because I have yet to see a daylily down here. 

The last ones I saw were Stella D'Oro daylilies just starting to bloom at a South Carolina rest stop on our way down to Florida in late March 2014.  I distinctly remember how happy I was to see them!  We were homeless, frazzled, and on the road.  And then I saw them.  I trilled to T: "Oh, the daylilies are starting to bloom here!"  Then I thought, "Oh yeah, WE don't HAVE any daylilies." I got back in the car and we resumed our journey to Central Florida, slouching all the way.

I mourn the loss of my sweet Mother's yellow bearded irises. That is another plant you cannot grow down here.  Now that Mom is gone, I wish I could have brought some with me.  However, I know they would not have survived. Instead, I am planting Louisiana irises in a wet area next to the house.  I think I will like them more than bearded irises anyway.  They have a more elegant shape.  My mother would understand.

I am quite happy to be free of that damned trumpet vine.  I loved my Grandpa, but his legacy plant quickly became a greedy gut, invasive weed that wanted to take over my soul. I was tired of fighting it. 

I actually bought three Stella D'Oro plants last month and put them in the ground.  Not to worry, I enriched the soil. Stella's are small, but they are the mighty workhorses of the daylily world.  If any daylily can make it in Central Florida it will be Stella. 

Unfortunately, it is only late May and my daylilies already seem to be burning up.  I am not used to watering daylilies.  I am more of a "survival of the fittest" gardener.  But I have been watering these.  I am going to give them my all.  If I cannot have a daylily on my land I fear I might have to rethink just about everything I believe to be true and good.  Then again, maybe it is time to rethink everything.  Canna lilies are good.  It is also true that I can grow them here.

Here is a photo of everything I believed to be true and good circa 2013 in Upstate New York:

Here is Ma's old fashioned yellow bearded iris:

Here is a photo from behind the naturalized "drop-gardening" area looking up towards our old garage.  Refer to my Flower Lust post for more about my "drop-gardening" technique.  The house is hidden behind that Crimson King maple tree on the right. If you look real hard you will see my Grandpa's trumpet vine blooming up in front of the brown garage like a small tree.  That garage was great, too.  It had garage doors in front (facing the street) and in back (facing the gardens).  Brilliant design for riding lawnmowers:

 

Below is a better shot of that damn Trumpet Vine.  T built a pergola for it to climb over, but it really wanted to climb up over the roof and embed its sticky suckers under and over the roofing tiles.  It did such damage to the garage.  We had to cut it back, hard, every year; but still it persisted. It was WAY stronger and more determined than we were.  It dropped seeds that grew all over the ground in front of it, and in every garden bed close by.  They always grew and their roots were deep.  Trumpet Vine can serve as an inspiration to us all but in someone else's garden, please.

Flower Lust

Let me just say right up front, I am greedy for flowers and plants.  I must have them if I am to be happy.  I need the color, the shapes, the scents, and a variety of types to keep my interest.  I go outside every morning and make the rounds, looking at them, loving them, and sending them special "You Are Beautiful" vibes so they will grow lush and happy.

There are SO many trees, shrubs, and flowers I want as we begin landscaping our pathetic little piece of paradise in this Florida subdivision.  Up North I could buy and plant just about anything that I wanted.  We had a lot of land, and it was fairly private.  I sincerely loved that land, but the sheer expanse made it hard for us to rein ourselves in.  We had an obscene number of perennial beds and way too many different kinds of flowers. Need herbs?  We made an herb garden.  Like pastel colored flowers?  We had a bed with only pastel blooming flowers in it.  T and I fought over what to put in a perennial bed?  Easy solution - we would just build our own, separate beds. We had lots of wild land, too.  I gleefully developed a type of gardening I called "drop gardening" where I would just drop divided pieces of beebalm and foxglove, daylilies and purple cone flowers into the wild areas knowing they would root and naturalize.  The results of my drop gardening were spectacular.  Now I know it was also excessive. Of course, I would never have realized this great truth if I had not given up country living for the more constrained life of a subdivision retiree. Now I know. Or at least that is what I am telling myself. 

In our old place it took T and me years to fully landscape the property.  We initially had a 5 year plan.  We were in our early 40's when we bought that house.  We were still working 5 days a week and the gardening season is fairly short up north, so a five year plan did not seem unreasonable.  Those were our glory days and we figured we had more than half our lives left to get the work done and wait for the flowers and trees to mature, and we did.  No big deal.  No pressure.  Gardening was what we did on the weekends for the few months of the year when it was possible to venture outside and work the soil.  It filled our lives.  Now we do not have anything else to do except babysit for our grandkids, and we can work outside all year round.  But who knows how much time we have left?  People in our lives are dropping like flies.  I do not mean to sound morbid, but I feel a little pressure to get this landscaping thing done quickly so we have time to enjoy it.  We will absolutely not be planting any large shade trees that might take 20 years to mature.  We are only looking for short-term gratification now.  If I was younger I would definitely plant a Live Oak to grow massively majestic (and spooky) as it accumulated Spanish Moss and eventually shaded the driveway.  But since I am old, I will live with the blazing summer sun burning up my car instead.  Last summer the sun destroyed our GPS. We did not realize you couldn't leave it in the car down here in August. The Florida sun burned that sucker right up. It would still turn on, but it behaved like a GPS with mental problems.  Sometimes we would be half way to our destination before it would start talking to us and giving us directions.  Poor thing.  We had to get rid of it.

Why not put our cars in the 2 car garage?  Well, most people do not use their garage for cars down here for the simple reason these houses do not have basements. There is no worry about digging your car out of a huge snow pile if you leave it in the driveway.  Consequently, it is hard not to use the garage like a basement instead.   Unless you can afford to store all your useless crap in a storage unit month after month, year after year, world without end, amen... you fill up your garage with the overage.  I love it when I am driving past someone's house and they have their garage door open so I can gauge whether they horde more junk than I do.  Some of the storage packing techniques are quite impressive, too.  Our garage provides space for many boxes of treasures we do not need AND a small candle factory. And our washer and dryer. Oh, and our bikes, too.  Oh yeah, and that weight bench and reclining stationary bike we do not use.  Hmmm, I am not sure why we brought those all the way down here.

Getting back to gardening, a 5 year plan could mean the difference between one of us being able to lift a 40 pound bag of composted cow manure or not.  I think not.  I think maybe we are going to have to make do with a two year plan this time.  Right now we are working HARD on a couple of beds on either side of the screened birdcage-like pool area, and planting larger shrubs and small trees to hide the fence.  Yes, in Florida we keep our pools inside birdcages.  It keeps the bugs out.  It also defines the area surrounding the space you Damn Yankees might call a patio.  Houses down here sometimes have "Florida Rooms" which are rooms inside the house, usually towards the back, with lots of windows kind of like a sun room.  Outside the house, the birdcages are usually attached to an outdoor room called a lanai, which has a roof and screened in sides but is still open to the pool on the front.  The lanai is especially great because you can sit outside to eat your meals without burning up from the sun.  I might start keeping our new GPS out there.  It would get lost in the garage.  It is a whole new world.  We are just trying to figure it out.  

This past weekend we went to a fabulous garden sale.  We bought loads of greenery we can now check off our garden bucket list. I got a pink camellia tree!!!!  And a fire bush, butterfly bush, and shrimp plant.  And an air plant.  We are both thrilled.  The coming week is going to be so much fun digging and planting.  I just wish I did not always regret the placement choice after the plants have already gone in the ground. Why didn't I buy that beautiful gardenia at the plant sale? Where in the hell am I going to put a butteryfly bush?